Good no? I don’t even wear a tinfoil hat 🙂 So what about you, how safe are ya? The Internet at least now knows I use Linux Mint and Firefox, and in case you go pointing fingers, Transmission is downloading the latest Ubuntu Karmic alpha!

My laptop is a piece or crap, I know this. 512Mb of RAM, Intel graphics card and a Intel Centrino Duo processor is nothing to write home about. This is why when I read that Xubuntu is a Linux OS designed for low-end machines, I downloaded the ISO, burned a live CD and had it installed in little over two hours. Now, if you are new to Linux and would like to know what Xubuntu has to offer you (Or any Canonical distribution for that matter) I suggest you take a look here. For everyone else, I’ll cut to the chase.

I installed Xubuntu because I wanted a very fast desktop that was stable and made the best usage of resources available. Xubuntu disappointed me on all these points.

Speed: I had previously been using Ubuntu 9.04, which I found slightly sluggish when using applications like Firefox and XBMC. Xubuntu did seem a bit quicker when navigating folders (Xfce being the desktop environment and thunar the file manager) but not a lot faster with resource hungry apps open. Worse, Xubuntu proved ABSOLUTELY unusable while installing new packages, something both the experienced user and the curious newbie do frequently. I also experienced several bouts of CPU 100% during each day with no obvious offender.

Stability: I never had problems with stability in Ubuntu, save when upgrading to a new release rather than installing it fresh. Xfce suffered a bug in where the entire system would stall, and even hitting standby would produce no results. This could happen every 3-4 days, taking into account I shutdown at least every two days.

Ease of Use: Ubuntu comes with a strong suite of applications included such as OpenOfice, Tomboy Notes, Firefox and Pidgin. Xubuntu sacrifices some of these for faster equivalents which is understandable. However, with the amount I use the former two apps I mentioned, I had to install them myself, which means an extra 300+ MB download at each new release.
On Ubuntu, it is simple to toggle touchpad preferences, and within 5 mins of install I had turned off the dreaded “tap-to-click”. There was no such similar GUI for Xubuntu, and this led to stressful editing of config files.

Worth a Install?: Simply, no. I appreciate the amount of work the community puts into a release like Xubuntu but if you’re system can’t handle Ubuntu, then you should look to other distributions such as Crunchbang Linux or even DSL (Damn Small Linux)

If you have any problems with my review, or would like to share your own experiences, please leave a comment.